Wow, haven't been around here lately! A long dead period in work finally took its toll on me and after much strenuous consideration opted me to apply at the Copenhagen Royal Art Academy's School of Design under Production Design. It'a a tough call as I've never been much of a school person, and have been capable to live off being a self educating freelance artisan so far. So, it's a pretty fundamental change, provided I pass the test soon to come. But hey, a BA sure wouldn't hurt

@the1sean: I got all but one or two shipsets done actually, but as I kept evolving different ways to enhance the glow, there's some sets I'd really like to redo.

Also I still need to add a few explosions

A second WOW - that new patch feature of race designed ships sure sounds awesome! Besides the obvious possibility to make stylistically distinct and more capable AI ships design wise, I reckon one could add xx family of more ship graphic variations and have the races use them beyond the specific class sets, to make later designs show in more ways than mere size. It could be really cool, to make more and more advanced looking ship variations with increasing rate of glow to show that more power was under the hood!

Welcome back Jon. Sounds like a tough month you've had. Good luck with your application, mate.

On the subject of the custom designs being used for additional shipsets. It's crossed my mind. Have you checked out my TRSE Star Trek mod? It's only for Return of the Shakturi at the moment, but it has an additional familyxx shipset. I haven't got round to testing it yet, but it would be cool to have early tech levels use the more primitive shipset, then mid-way, say level 3 or 4, move onto the new shipset with the more updated ships from later in the Star Trek TNG timeline.

I see no reason game mechanics wise that it should not be possible. Also smaller resolutions could be used on earlier designs to make it more memory friendly. Only late game huge designs would require large resolution images. With the white ships I made, early on the detail where complete overkill. Heck even late game a capital ship would still not be stretching my relatively low resolution frigate image.

I wonder if the developers could give us a chart explaining the engines stretching in regard to resolution of image file and hull size. Without that it would be a very very trial and error balance - especially if it's not a linear progression. I remember reading about the troubles getting a good Borg Cube, so I guess there are more factors at play than just image resolution and hull size. Anyone got some experience in this regard!?

I wonder if the developers could give us a chart explaining the engines stretching in regard to resolution of image file and hull size. Without that it would be a very very trial and error balance - especially if it's not a linear progression. I remember reading about the troubles getting a good Borg Cube, so I guess there are more factors at play than just image resolution and hull size. Anyone got some experience in this regard!?

I don't understand the inner workings, but we've been told to keep to the 300x300 resolution. The game resizes all images when it renders them, so changing the sizes apparently gives the game more work to do. Does that make sense?

Anyway, the reason for the Borg cube being so small, is that the image is almost completely made up of opaque pixels.

What the engine does is it resizes ships based on their opaque:transparent pixel ratio. So ships with lots of area (like a Borg cube) are sized smaller, and ships without much to them (like a klingon D7 with its long thin neck) are sized larger.

I'm getting a bit fed up with this method. I believe it would be better to allow the modder to choose what size each ship will appear as via the races text files. It could be linked directly with the "ShipSizeFactorMilitary ;" settings.

Hello people! I just sat down and spend the evening making the last 8 explosions for the mod, so that non are rotated copies of each other any longer. I currently have them as 4x5 515x515 images or in other words 2048x2560. Anyone knows if there is a program that can auto cut an image like that into 20 512x512 images. I ask because they are a hell to copy and paste as new image with precision in the program I'm currently using.

Found out I didn't need a program anyway. It is possible to upload an image to http://imagesplitter.net/ and get a zip back containing the grid cut image as frames. That's a BIG time saver and it should eliminate jumpy frames and I won't have to do the steps that gave me the previous green and black dots

A note on the http://imagesplitter.net/ Somehow the png format it spits out when splitting is incompatible with the game - however loading and re-saving the png's in a painting program makes them compatible with the game again